bienvenido a quilpué

Driving eastwards down the highway inland from Viña del Mar, you meander through some hills out of the city and past a few smaller pueblos before the road takes you directly into Chilean suburbia.  The steeper slopes of the outskirts are home to some of the more run-down neighborhoods with houses that look like scrap metal was pieced together by hand and the leftovers litter the rest of the yards.  Deeper into the town, the increase in level of privilege is apparent as the conditions improve, though graffiti still covers everything.  Each block is lined with small houses only a few feet apart and gated off for safety.  As you approach the town centro, more commercial buildings appear, none more than two or three stories tall.  These mom and pop shops are just one-room establishments with a counter separating customers from the ceiling to floor shelves of goods.  In the middle of the centro, a compact four-story mall towers out of place from the rest of the short buildings.

Welcome to Quilpué, the sprawling town of 120,000 in the hills east of the more popular coastal cities of Valparaiso and Viña.  This is my home for the next seven months.  I live in the nicer part of town, just a 10 minute walk from the centro and the metro station that takes you to the coast in one direction and Parque Nacional La Campana in the other.  My house is on a tree-lined street called Calle Patricio Lynch, named after an Admiral in the Chilean navy and the commander in chief during the occupation of Peru.  My area is generally safe during the day--there is a preschool one block over--but after dark, using a cab is advised if traveling alone.  Since it's a good-sized town, you can pretty much find anything you want--food, toiletries, clothes, cafes, bars, really anything if you look around.  It's not the most aesthetically pleasing town but the sun sets behind the shrub-covered hills off in the distance and you can see the tall peaks of La Campana lit up purple at dusk to the east.  Like the rest of Chile, a pack of stray dogs patrols our neighborhood and chases off any solo straggler that might wander its way into their territory.  Our German Shepard, Laica, sometimes barks from inside our gates, right under my window, wanting to join in the defense, but she's usually pretty good at shutting up when I get fed up and yell at her.  Luckily, this only happens about once a week.

Quilpué is a developed town for the most part with a governing mayor, paved streets, metro line, drinkable running water, and enforced laws.  The society functions smoothly and everyone pleasantly goes about their own lives.  But it is also a town that would bode well with some work.  The Rio Mapocho which runs through Santiago is a nasty brown color and unnavigable because the sewage from the city is dumped in it untreated.  In Quilpué, there are sections of streets that run over clearly-apparent open waste areas as the smells are definitely not of lavender fields.  A lot of the streets and hillsides are speckled with litter, rival transit workers hang out the open doors of moving buses and yell over each other to round up more passengers, and the schools here are no exception to the broken education system.  These are reminders that this is still Latin America and that Chile is a country in transition, a former third world trying to be a first world who hasn't quite worked out all the kinks yet.

And now, this is my home.